Daily Reflection Tuesday of the Second Week of Lent

Today’s gospel reading opens the 23rd chapter of Matthew, which is almost entirely Jesus’ denouncement of the scribes and Pharisees with the seven severe “woes” he pronounces against them that follow immediately upon today’s passage. The chapter ends with his lament over Jerusalem, “The city that kills the prophets and stones those sent to it!”

Of course, Jesus’ epic confrontations with the Pharisees, those “blind guides,” as he will call them, occur from the very beginning of his ministry and directly result, finally, in his death by crucifixion. Jesus’ problems with them are many but can be reduced to the fact that they “do not practice what they preach,” (the very definition of hypocrisy) and that they are arrogant, proud and vain. It might be said that they are in it (religion) for the pay out, for what they can get out of it. But ultimately it is that they, to use a famous saying, have contempt prior to investigation. Because Jesus did not fit into their understanding or their absolutes, they rejected him from the very start, refusing to really hear anything he said, seeing him only as a threat to their very selves and their (oh so comfortable) way of life.

For the Pharisees and scribes had wrapped themselves so tightly in their religion that it became drained of all its spiritual foundations (“For you… have neglected the weightier matters of the law: justice and mercy and faith. It is these you ought to have practiced without neglecting the others”). They made religion their idol. It is, sadly, a trap that can engulf any of us when our faith becomes merely something that must be defended at all costs, that must be adhered to without any reservations or extenuating circumstances, that becomes but a collection of rules and regulations that then become absolute and used to merely judge and condemn those who break them in any way. It becomes something we use to find fault with others, that we use to separate ourselves from others and something in which we end up merely going through the motions. We can end up missing the far deeper, far more mysterious life-giving spiritual foundations of our religion.

Whenever we come to believe in something absolutely, except for some very few things such as God is, and God is love, then we largely cease to be teachable. We become incapable of change because to change means to come to a new awareness, a new belief or understanding that challenges our former ways. To remain teachable is to have the humility to see that we are never fully aware, never fully within the Kingdom in this life. That there is always more to be revealed, more ways of understanding that we did not know, more of our sinful pride and ego to overcome, more ways we can love more completely and more realization of how little we actually know and of how much our selfishness and fears still rein. There is always more to surrender to God, which can include even some of our most tightly held understandings or even beliefs (“The Son of Man is Lord even of the Sabbath!”).

The humble never assume that they know or understand everything they need to know or understand. The humble know that at the basis of all that is, are found not rules or even traditions or understandings. At the deepest center of all lies something far beyond all of that, beyond all understanding. At the very heart of it all lies the one thing necessary. It is love, the one thing, as the Apostle Paul told us, that never ends and as the evangelist told us, is God.